This Croatian vintner ages his wine a few meters under the surface of the ocean. He claims that, among other things, the silence of the bottom of the sea protects the wine from damage from sound (!).
It all sounds like a marketing gimmick to me. Glorious vintages have been made for thousands of years above the ground, so I don’t see any real benefit to aging your product under water except for maybe branding. And wine is susceptible to damage from sound?? Do vintners not named Edi Bajurin take care to protect their product from sound?
There is an anti turbulence movement in wine making currently. The idea is that tannins polymerize during maturation which gives less bite and a smoother mouth fell to the wine. These polymers are very fragile and once broken lose some of the mature feel of the wine. The non crazy way to deal with this is to move to siphons and the primary way of moving mature wines rather that pumps and entire wineries have been built using gravity feed to minimize the need for pumping. Sound could be an extreme version of the avoidance of vibrations though a worthless one since the wine will get beaten up more in the back of the truck on the way to the store.
Mostly it’s marketing but it probably started as hearing something wrong.
One thing that’s very noticable when I go snorkeling is how LOUD it is under the water. Sound travels farther in water than in air, and there are all sorts of noises happening down there – waves crashing, fish crunching on coral, bubbles, etc. I think if you really wanted to store wine in a quiet place, a soundproofed building would be a LOT quieter than in the ocean.
I suspect the real advantage would be more consistent temperature without big or fast swings in any direction. But you get that in your average wine aging cave anyway.
Maybe you cut down on the oxygen getting in, but seems to me you’re just trading off with seawater.
But aging underwater does the exact opposite. The bottles or barrels are gently rocked by waves and tides. One of the main reasons given for aging underwater is that it stirs the wine on the lees, which aids fermentation.
Yeah, the sound/vibration argument is complete BS, but temperature control is important. In the right spot, the ocean will do even better than a cave or cellar.
A little air exchange is important for the character of some wines. This is why aging in barrels is different than aging in a steel tank with some oak chips thrown in. But you don’t want to age forever in a barrel, so putting it underwater for years of aging can address that, assuming you seal it properly.
In summary, it’s probably 90% gimmick, inspired by 100-year old wine found in shipwrecks. The remaining 10% might be the rocking motion, controlled temperature, limited light exposure, and the added pressure (especially for sparkling wines). Sounds vibrations is precisely 0%.
I half suspect that this whole tannin polymer thing is bunk as well; if they’re so fragile, they’ll almost certainly get messed up through anything but the gentlest of handling in transit, at the store, and in the final serving.
I agree- the ocean aging is at least 90% gimmick for sure.
Well maturation and fermentation are different steps and one doesn’t have much to do with the other. Agitation during fermentation is important and there are lots of mechanisms that would make that work. I’d be concerned about the pressure on the barrel effecting CO2 saturation and hurting the efficiency of the fermentation.
There are thousands of lab tests backing up tannin polymer formation and breakdown as well as the effect on taste and mouth feel. You are correct that they aren’t that fragile but there is a big difference between going through a centrifugal pump and rocking in a full bottle or even the sonic vibrations from a loud room. The pump is much more turbulent and there are many sane wineries that are eliminating the pumps as much as possible to increase wine quality.
You’re right, I misspoke. Primary and secondary fermentation isn’t being done underwater. I was referring to aging on the lees (used more commonly for white wines, but still sometimes used with reds). I couldn’t tell if the guy in the video does that, but some of the other winemakers who age underwater are. When aging on the lees, the wine should be stirred regularly (“bâtonnage”) to increase contact with them.
I haven’t seen research how pumping or vibrations could break apart tannin polymers. I’m not ruling it out, but it seems questionable to me. But without a doubt, pumping and agitation is very important in what happens to tannins in wine because of the effect of oxygen. Some oxygen is important (thus the aging in barrels), but pumps introduce uncontrolled oxygen exposure, so it becomes more of a crapshoot. It’s understandable they want to minimize this effect.
Not wanting to sit through a video - is there any laboratory evidence of significant chemical composition differences in wine aged under the bottom of the sea, and more importantly evidence through blind taste testing that Twenty Thousand Leagues Merlot is better tasting or has superior mouthfeel compared to earthbound vintages?
Wine marketing is so full of gimmickry and pretension already*, why would there be any special fuss about this guy’s claims?
That’s a good article I’ll have to dig up a couple of papers on the breaking of the polymers for you tomorrow. There are a ton of effects going on during maturation and it is very complicated to isolate any single one. I’ve built multiple distilleries that focused on brandy that go as far as to never move barrels so that percipitate doesn’t leave the barrels with the spirit. I’ve also done gravity feed wineries for the same purpose but the research I did for those projects was several years ago so I don’t have it on top of mind. I spend a lot more time on the chemistry of maturing spirits in either case oxygenation, extraction, evaporation and insitu reactions are the main types of mechanisms. It tends to be a bad idea when any single form dominates.
That’s fair- I misunderstood- I thought this tannin polymer stuff was referring to something other than the well-understood role of tannins in aging of wine.
As I understand it, the main contributions to flavor and mouthfeel deal with the astringent tannins reacting with other wine components and the resulting compounds being less astringent and less harsh. I had never heard that there was an actual mouthfeel component that was independent of removing the tannins from the equation.
It’s in a bottle, which is itself in a clay amphora (because reasons). So unless something goes horribly wrong, no more salty than the vintner intended.